Moray Mystery

Rick at MBSL&S has a very interesting post about the mysterious deaths of dozens of moray eels in the Antilles. As much as I would rather he didn't have to write about such an event, he does a great job of relaying the real-world issues and science at hand. Go check it out - it's a good, yet unfortunate, read.

That's a lot of gorillas!

In some exciting conservation news that almost slipped me by (a hearty thanks to "the Naner" for pointing it out to me), researchers have discovered a new population of critically-endangered western lowland gorillas in the Republic of Congo. The estimate of 125,000 individuals (!), based on the number of "nests" observed in the 47,000 km² area, is more than double the previous estimate for the number of these gorillas in the wild.

At first I thought the 125,000 number must be a mistake - I would have thought finding 30 gorillas was a big deal. But then I read that these gorillas were found in the swamps of equatorial Africa in a remote part of the Congo, so I can understand why they hadn't been found before. Just thinking about their location gives me malarial chills...

Read more here...

Watch a video of the gorilla discovery here...

Dr. Ian Malcolm would not like this

Forgive my Malcolm-esque skepticism, but this "solution" to Australia's cane toad problem sounds like a bad idea:

Native animals, such as quolls, goannas, snakes and crocodiles, that eat the toads usually suffer an agonising death. The bigger the toad, the greater the dose of its poison, and the greater the chance the predator will die.

Lab work by Rick Shine at Sydney University and his team shows, though, that if an animal eats a small cane toad and manages to survive, it doesn't usually repeat the mistake. "It's astonishing how quickly fish, frogs and some small mammals are learning to avoid the toads after a bad experience," Shine says.

He now proposes taking advantage of this by releasing baby, sterile male "teacher toads", in advance of the invasion front. Native animals that ate these small toads would probably vomit up their meal, but survive – and should then steer clear of the larger, deadlier toads when they arrive....For good measure, he says, the teacher toads could also be infected with a lung worm parasite that targets only the toads so that they won't start invading themselves.

Clearly, I am no expert here, but what percentage of intentionally released non-native species has worked out as expected? Why do I get a feeling that ten years from now we'll be reading about Australia's native amphibians succumbing to an invasive lung worm parasite, yet "surprisingly" the cane toads will still be around and poisoning the native wildlife?

Perhaps this is just my knee-jerk bias against introducing non-natives to an area rearing its ugly head - as one commenter suggested when I wrote about Pleistocene rewilding - but I don't see how adding more cane toads to the picture is a sustainable solution.

As reported in New Scientist

Wolves loose in Massachusetts?

This is some very exciting news. After over 150 years of being absent from the state, a wild gray eastern wolf (Canis lupus lycaon^*) has been positively ID'ed in western Mass. Unfortunately, it was also shot dead after MassWildlife officials told the farmer whose livestock was being eaten that the culprit was a dog and that the "dog" could be legally shot if it was ever seen again on his property. Well, sure enough, the farmer saw the "dog" and killed it. Only upon inspection of the dead dog wolf did they realize what they had. DNA tests done by the US Fish and Wildlife Service at their Forensics Lab confirmed the identification. (BTW, I always thought that the USFWS Forensics Lab would be a cool place to work). Of course, now there are numerous questions about where this animal came from and if this means that the gray eastern wolf is naturally recolonizing its former New England range.

Personally, I think this is outstanding news - native species, reclaiming their native territories, on their own. The presence of this wolf in western Mass suggests that there are viable green corridors connecting the state with healthy wolf packs in Canada. I'm not sure this state is ready for the reappearance of wolves - I'm sure no one has been discussing the possibility much after over a century of absence - but hopefully, the next wolf won't be so unceremoniously shot.

Speaking of being unceremoniously shot, I find it odd that neither MassWildlife's nor the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game's website has any mention of this event. Clearly, they can't be too thrilled about the wolf being killed, but wouldn't you think the presence of the first wolf in Massachusetts in 160 years would be heralded by the state's wildlife conservation agencies?

^*Recent genetic evidence suggests that the eastern wolf is a distinct species and neither a subspecies of the gray wolf, Canis lupus, nor a gray wolf-coyote hybrid as once proposed

Deep Sea News - Just One Thing Challenge

Do you want to help protect the deep sea?

Are you up to a challenge?

If you answered 'yes' to both of those questions then head on over to DSN and sign up for their weekly "Just One Thing Challenge".

Rewilding revisited

I'd like to redirect attention to a post I made back in July about Pleistocene Rewilding of North America. In it I offer my opinion that this is a bad idea. Recently, a reader has brought a good discussion to the table and I'd like to see if I can open it up even more. Please jump in with us.

I'd hate to have a discussion that I think could be interesting, educational, and useful be buried under months of newer posts.

Long-term rainforest study in danger

Of all the ironic things...

It looks like one of the world's watershed ecological experiments is in danger of succumbing to the pressures it was designed to study. The Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragmentation Project (formerly the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems Project) is a large-scale field experiment on the effects of habitat fragmentation that has been in existence since the late 1970s. This study, initiated by Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, essentially took a swath of Amazon rainforest and created a patchwork of forest fragments of different sizes. The initial intent was to empirically solve the SLOSS question (Single Large or Several Small) - the question for conservation biologists of whether it is better (biodiversity-wise) to create one large reserve or many, smaller ones who's total area equaled the larger (the SLOSS argument, in turn, was influenced by another seminal work - MacArthur's and Wilson's Theory of Island Biogeography). As with any good scientific endeavor, this experiment has revealed a lot more than it originally set out to - e.g. the importance of edge effects, microhabitat changes, habitat diversity, and on and on...The work that has come out of this study has influenced countless conservation efforts and has been a cornerstone topic for teaching about environmental science, experimental design, conservation biology, and general ecology.

Unfortunately, it now seems that the experiment is in serious of danger of being destroyed by encroaching development. The population in the surrounding area has grown to the point where people are starting to spread out into the experimental area - burning some of the forest plots and raiding research camps. I suppose this sort of thing was inevitable with the rate of population growth, especially in developing countries, but it will be a sad day for science if/when such an important and innovative experiment is forced to shut down.

African elephants live in Africa for a reason

In this month's Scientific American is an article about a topic that gets my blood going whenever I read about it - the concept of Pleistocene Rewilding. For those of you who haven't heard of it, Pleistocene Rewilding is the idea that we should introduce non-native megafauna to North American ecosystems. The basic idea is that up to 10,000 years or so ago, relatives of these animals roamed North America as key cogs in the natural landscape. Then humans arrived and most of the large animals went extinct. The correlation between the extinctions and the arrival of Homo sapiens has lead to the hypothesis that humans hunted the large herbivores to the point where their populations were too low to be sustained. With a lack of large herbivores, large carnivores were also unable to survive. The Pleistocene rewilding is an attempt to reverse this Pleistocene overkill.

Lions, mammoths, camels, horses, cheetahs, and others were all found in various ecosystems throughout North America and helped shape the evolution and ecology of plants and animals still found today. For example, it is hypothesized that the pronghorn's speed evolved to help it evade American cheetahs (why else should it run over 60 mph?), and that the large seeds of the honey locust tree were eaten and dispersed by mammoths (now, the honey locust has no natural seed dispersal). Proponents of Pleistocene rewilding see North American ecosystems as "broken", missing major players. Since the missing fauna are now extinct, the idea is to use extant species as proxies. Re-wilders want to import African elephants, cheetahs, lions, and camels to restore North America to what it was (might have been?) before humans killed off the large mammals.

I first read about Pleistocene rewilding some years ago in the now-defunct journal Wild Earth. More recently, researchers at Cornell have reinvigorated the rewilding push. I think it is a monumentally bad idea. First, it's gimmicky - the article in SciAm talks about the increased tourist revenues it would bring in and even shows an illustration with a monorail in the background. If this is what you want, go to Disney's Animal Kingdom, Six Flags' Wild Safari, or the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park. Second, and most important, these animals don't belong here. I'm all for the conservation and restoration of ecosystems. The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone was a phenomenal, watershed event. But Canis lupus used to live there - in historic times nonetheless - and still were living relatively nearby. Before zoos, African elephants NEVER lived in North America. African cheetahs NEVER lived in North America. The Dromedary Camel NEVER lived in North America. And even though the American and African lions are considered subspecies of Panthera leo I wonder how similar they truly were (isolated for at least tens of thousnads of years, living in different environments). Haven't we seen the results time and time again of introducing non-native species to ecosystems?

I might think differently about Pleistocene rewilding if we were able to actually reintroduce the Pleisotcene fauna. How great would it be to see herds of mammoths roaming around? Or the chance to see a cheetah chase down a pronghorn? Alas, unless there's some Jurassic Park technologies out there, this ain't happening.